When you're designing a game, one of the key things you have to decide is what verbs are available to the player. "Verbs" in this context are anything a player can do at a conceptual level. Typical MMO verbs are things like attacking, running away, running around exploring, buffing people, taunting, and so on. Our traditional MMO verb list is pretty well established, and pretty dull.
Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary Nintendo designer, once explained that making a new Nintendo game involves picking the verbs first and adding context later, once you're sure you have fun verbs. MMOs should be no different, during the planning stages you need to know why classes are fun, what powers players can look forward to as they advance, what neat tricks they're going to be able to pull in dungeons and so on.
New verbs can make anything feel fresh. Want to make yet another fantasy MMO? No problem: just make sure it has lots of fresh new verbs!
Of course, there's a reason we've settled into the limited set of "traditional" MMO verbs: they're easy to code and easy to balance. The more we break the mold, the more work we have to do. But that's the difference between an amazing new game and another me-too game.
Let's look at some examples of fun but tricky verbs that some MMOs add to their repertoire:
Feign Death: With feign death, the character falls over and pretends to be dead. This is a relatively low-tech verb, and shows up in lots of games. But even so, this one is rife with exploit conditions, detection-sphere issues if your game has server-side physics, for instance. Plus, you have to handle all sorts of special cases. If I kill 51% of a monster and then feign death, does the monster go back "on the market" so that anybody can attack it? If so, do I get any of the XP from the monster when it finally dies? You also have to work out how group aggro works in tandem with feign death, and many other special cases.
It's actually a tricky and time-consuming verb to add. But it's fun!
(feign death in World of Warcraft)
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